> But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does.

I'm not as certain as you are. Correlation does not imply causation, but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.

A few years ago Shirley Manson (lead singer of the 90s band Garbage) accused YouTube of making its fortune off the backs of content creators - basically charging the entire enterprise as being one big exercise in copyright infringement. And yet the music industry, as well as Hollywood, seem to be doing better and better each year in terms of dollars made. Some of the distribution models have changed - broadcast and cable television are pretty dead in the water, but the entertainment industries in general seem to be doing better than ever. And yeah lots of individual artists are still getting raw deals from Spotify and labels etc. as they always have. But industry-wise, in terms of dollar amounts, it seems there's more money to be made than ever before from creating and selling entertainment.

The statement you made that I absolutely agree with is that it's hard to get real world data on this. An individual who is able to get free access to something may be unlikely to ever pay for that same thing.But the answer to the question: "Does piracy hurt the industry's bottom line, or help it on the whole?" is a very difficult question to answer. And we have to consider the even harder stuff to measure. Things like: is a teenager who pirates recorded media more or less likely to buy merch and concert tickets? More or less likely to buy a special edition package with tangible collector items?

At the end of the day, I have no clue.

I also offer all of this being very pro-capitalism and pro-intellectual-property. I don't condone piracy. But if we're just looking at raw data and trying to form our hypothesis, we have to start with the fact that the raw data points to upwards trends on the whole.

> but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.

But they were also on an upward trend before the age of piracy, so it's perfectly plausible to think they would be even higher. The same technologies that enable digital piracy also lower the cost of legal distribution, so you'd expect to see the industry doing better at the same time that piracy is rising.

Now, I'm of course not shedding too many tears for the major Hollywood studios, but I would like to live in a world with more niche films and games, and of course it's still quite difficult to make a living as an author or musician—a few manage it, most don't.

We agree that we don't have data—but to me, it just makes intuitive sense that a large majority of pirates are pirating lots of things they would have otherwise bought. For piracy to counteract that by generating buzz or aiding discovery or whatever it is... well, it would have to be an awful lot of buzz!

Occasionally in life, intuitions are dead wrong, and actual data leads to surprising discoveries. However, when faced with a lack of data, the first assumption shouldn't be "reality is the opposite of whatever I'd intuitively expect," that makes no sense.

I think there's a ton of motivated reasoning going on, and it just really bothers me. If you're going to pirate stuff, at least be honest with yourself about it.